Definitions of Advertising Formats

Display Advertising - advertiser pays an online company for space to display a staticor hyper-linked banner or logo on one or more of the online company’s pages.

Sponsorship - advertiser sponsors targeted Web site or email areas (e.g., entire web site, site area, an event, parts or all of an email message). Sponsorships can and usually do contain some banner elements. To the extent possible, separate and report revenues for other formats contained within the sponsorship campaign.

E-mail - banner ads, links or advertiser sponsorships that appear in e-mail newsletters, e-mail marketing campaigns and other commercial e-mail communications. Includes all types of electronic mail (e.g., basic text or HTML-enabled).

Search - fees advertisers pay online companies to list and/or link theircompany site domain name to a specific search word or phrase (includes paid search revenues). Search categories include:

• Paid listings - text links appear at the top or side of search results for specific keywords. The more a marketer pays, the higher the position it gets. Marketers only pay when a user clicks on the text link.
• Contextual search - text links appear in an article based on the context of the content, instead of a user-submitted keyword. Payment only occurs when the link is clicked.
• Paid inclusion - guarantees that a marketer’s URL is indexed by a search engine. The listing is determined by the engine's search algorithms.
• Site optimization - modifies a site to make it easier for search engines to automatically index the site and hopefully result in better placement in results.

Referrals / Lead Generation - fees advertisers pay to online companies that refer qualified purchase inquiries (e.g., auto dealers which pay a fee in exchange for receiving a qualified purchase inquiry online) or provide consumer information (demographic, contact, behavioral) where the consumer opts into being contacted by a marketer (email, postal, telephone, fax). These processes are priced on a performance basis (e.g., cost-per-action, -lead or -inquiry), and can include user applications (e.g., for a credit card), surveys, contests (e.g., sweepstakes) or registrations.

Classifieds and auctions - fees advertisers pay online companies to list specific productsor services (e.g., online job boards and employment listings, real estate listings,automotive listings, auction-based listings, yellow pages).

Rich media - advertisements that integrate some component of streaming videoand/or audio and interactivity, in addition to flash or java script ads, and can allow users to view and interact with products or services (e.g., a multimedia product description, a “virtual test-drive”). “Interstitials”have been consolidated within the rich media category and represent full-or partial-page text and image server-push advertisements which appear in the transition between two pages of content. Forms of interstitials can include splash screens, pop-up windows and superstitials.

Slotting fees - fees charged to advertisers by online companies to secure premium positioning of an advertisement on their site, category exclusivity or similar preference positioning (similar to slotting allowances charged by retailers).